Carnival of space #277

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Monday, November 26, 2012

Carnival of space #277

Hi and welcome again to the Venus Transit for another carnival of space. The Transit is history at least for the next hundreds years, but there is plenty of other stuff going around so take a small break and dive into this issue.

Carnival of Space

Ray Sanders from "Dear Astronomer" has a new episode of "The Cosmic Ray Show" airing on November 27th at 7:00PM Pacific. Join Ray along with his
co-host, astronomer Jerry Hilburn, and special guest, astronomer Dave
Reneke as they discuss the recent solar eclipse, and take a virtual tour
of the astronomical sights of the southern hemisphere. Featured
musical guest is Google+ sensation, Ryan Van Sickle.

Is there a role for airships in the space age? This post from tranquility base introduces two
novel ways that airships can contribute to space exploration.

Centauri Dreams looks at Rod Hyde's ideas on laser fusion, as developed
in a starship paper he wrote in the 1970s along with collaborators at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Two articles from Next Big Future:In an interview with NPR, John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the Mars Curiosity rover mission, indicated that the
data [that they are getting from Mars Science Laboratory Sample Analysis
at Mars Instruments] is gonna be one for the history books. It's
looking really good. The announcement will be in a few weeks after more
tests and confirmations are run. Curiosity can not directly detect the
presence of Mars life. Curiosity can detect organics, which would be the
presence of the building blocks of life on the surface of Mars.

Information acquired by L2 this week revealed plans for
a “game-changing” announcement as early as December that a new
commercial space company intends to send commercial astronauts to the moon by 2020. According to the information, the effort is led by a group
of high profile individuals from the aerospace industry and backed by
some big money and foreign investors. The company intends to use
“existing or soon to be existing launch vehicles, spacecraft, upper
stages, and technologies” to start their commercial manned lunar
campaign. New Space Watch identifies the company Golden Spike as the
company that will have the commercial manned mission to the moon. It is
registered in Colorado to Alan Stern, a former administrator of NASA's
Science Mission Directorate, and now working on the New Horizons Pluto
mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.